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S.877
One Hundred Eighth Congress
of the
United States of America
AT THE FIRST SESSION
Begun and held at the City of Washington
on Tuesday,
the seventh day of January, two thousand
and three
An Act
To regulate interstate commerce
by imposing limitations and penalties on the transmission
of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.
Be it enacted by the Senate and
House of Representatives of the United States of America in
Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the `Controlling
the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act
of 2003', or the `CAN-SPAM Act of 2003'.
SEC. 2. CONGRESSIONAL FINDINGS AND POLICY.
(a) FINDINGS- The Congress finds the
following:
(1) Electronic mail has become an
extremely important and popular means of communication,
relied on by millions of Americans on a daily basis for
personal and commercial purposes. Its low cost and global
reach make it extremely convenient and efficient, and offer
unique opportunities for the development and growth of frictionless
commerce.
(2) The convenience and efficiency
of electronic mail are threatened by the extremely rapid
growth in the volume of unsolicited commercial electronic
mail. Unsolicited commercial electronic mail is currently
estimated to account for over half of all electronic mail
traffic, up from an estimated 7 percent in 2001, and the
volume continues to rise. Most of these messages are fraudulent
or deceptive in one or more respects.
(3) The receipt of unsolicited commercial
electronic mail may result in costs to recipients who cannot
refuse to accept such mail and who incur costs for the storage
of such mail, or for the time spent accessing, reviewing,
and discarding such mail, or for both.
(4) The receipt of a large number
of unwanted messages also decreases the convenience of electronic
mail and creates a risk that wanted electronic mail messages,
both commercial and noncommercial, will be lost, overlooked,
or discarded amidst the larger volume of unwanted messages,
thus reducing the reliability and usefulness of electronic
mail to the recipient.
(5) Some commercial electronic mail
contains material that many recipients may consider vulgar
or pornographic in nature.
(6) The growth in unsolicited commercial
electronic mail imposes significant monetary costs on providers
of Internet access services, businesses, and educational
and nonprofit institutions that carry and receive such mail,
as there is a finite volume of mail that such providers,
businesses, and institutions can handle without further
investment in infrastructure.
(7) Many senders of unsolicited
commercial electronic mail purposefully disguise the source
of such mail.
(8) Many senders of unsolicited
commercial electronic mail purposefully include misleading
information in the messages' subject lines in order to induce
the recipients to view the messages.
(9) While some senders of commercial
electronic mail messages provide simple and reliable ways
for recipients to reject (or `opt-out' of) receipt of commercial
electronic mail from such senders in the future, other senders
provide no such `opt-out' mechanism, or refuse to honor
the requests of recipients not to receive electronic mail
from such senders in the future, or both.
(10) Many senders of bulk unsolicited
commercial electronic mail use computer programs to gather
large numbers of electronic mail addresses on an automated
basis from Internet websites or online services where users
must post their addresses in order to make full use of the
website or service.
(11) Many States have enacted legislation
intended to regulate or reduce unsolicited commercial electronic
mail, but these statutes impose different standards and
requirements. As a result, they do not appear to have been
successful in addressing the problems associated with unsolicited
commercial electronic mail, in part because, since an electronic
mail address does not specify a geographic location, it
can be extremely difficult for law-abiding businesses to
know with which of these disparate statutes they are required
to comply.
(12) The problems associated with
the rapid growth and abuse of unsolicited commercial electronic
mail cannot be solved by Federal legislation alone. The
development and adoption of technological approaches and
the pursuit of cooperative efforts with other countries
will be necessary as well.
(b) CONGRESSIONAL DETERMINATION OF
PUBLIC POLICY- On the basis of the findings in subsection
(a), the Congress determines that--
(1) there is a substantial government
interest in regulation of commercial electronic mail on
a nationwide basis;
(2) senders of commercial electronic
mail should not mislead recipients as to the source or content
of such mail; and
(3) recipients of commercial electronic
mail have a right to decline to receive additional commercial
electronic mail from the same source.
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